What's the Actual Number One Cause of Death in Children?

Is the right to bear arms responsible for
being the #1 cause of child gun deaths?
Is it time to abolish the 2nd Amendment?

Some people I like today said on camera that the number one cause of death of children was guns. First off, I would think that the number one cause of death was shooters. Secondly, it's a deceptive, manipulative lie. That's because the statistics are manipulated by changing the definition of "children".

Benjamin Disraeli, 19th Century Prime Minister of England, once opined, "There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." In this case, the number one cause of death in children requires some serious manipulation of the numbers and definition. If you look it up in most anti-gun websites, gun related deaths in children top motor vehicle accidents, other sorts of accidents and individually each other cause of death such as illness, poisoning, murder, and manslaughter. Here's how you do it.

Infants seldom die of gun violence, so
they are not included in the child death
rate by guns statistics to avoid bringing
down the "numbers" of child gun deaths.

If you define a "child" as aged from one to nineteen, you arguably get somewhere between 4 and 5 thousand children's deaths. The reason they don't include age 0 to 1 numbers is because it would remove gun deaths from the number one spot. The death from natural causes is significantly higher as babies are fragile creatures and we caregivers don't get a lot of training before they are born. Meanwhile, even with the age of children being extended to include 18 to 19 years old the 0-12 month death rate from "other than guns" is pretty significant and not many babies often die from being shot. 

These guys have inordinate numbers of gun deaths,
so they are counted as children to inflate the
child gun deaths numbers.

The reason the definition doesn't exclude 18 to 19-year-olds from being counted as children is that leaving them out would cut the number of child gun death numbers in half. Including murders and suicide by depressed teens and teenage gang members from Chicago, LA and Detroit, runs up the numbers of so-called deaths by gun violence. The inflated numbers glommed onto the child death stats makes no allowance for kids killed in mass shootings in "gun-free" zones by 18 to 26 year olds using illegally obtained guns nor for the cops shooting the shooter. He gets counted as a child gun death. I don't know about you, but "children" age 18 and up don't seem much like children at that age. If you can be tried as an adult, I believe you ARE an adult. Don't be blowing smoke up my skirt by telling me that someone who shaves (face or legs I don't care) is a child. 

And yet well-meaning people get all in a twitter because they believe that toddlers are shooting each other in droves based on this statistical picture being painted by the anti-gun lobby. This is the picture such statistical manipulation is supposed to create in your mind. It's the same with adult gun death statistics. When our progressive friends talk about "victims" of gun violence, they cite statistics that are deliberately skewed to make you believe these are people who died at the hands of criminals or in gun accidents. What they don't tell you is that whenever a cop shoots a criminal caught in the act, when a homeowner shoots a home invader in self-defense, when a citizen with a gun puts a stop to a mass shooter, or when a father shoots a farm hand who is raping his daughter in the barn (true story), it is recorded as a death by "gun violence."  No one records statistics when a Florida grandmother chases off a pair of home invaders by waving her shotgun at them or when a young mother with toddlers fires a shot at thieves ransacking her home or when an 89-year-old man is charged by a 20-year-old thief intent on looting the house next door and cops are an hour away according to the 911 operator. In Texas, charges against the old guy are dismissed automatically based on the "he needed killin'" principle.

The thing is that half of the gun-violence-against-children gun death numbers are created by "kids" who look like the picture above on the right. It's not a true picture of those "gun deaths" but it certainly distracts Mom & Pop America from the true purpose of all the talk about massive gun confiscation going on in the halls of power and in the media these days. 

It's important to note that every tyrannical government in history first finds an excuse to disarm the citizenry. The Nazis disarmed the Jews. The Communists disarmed the proletariat, the Chinese under Mao disarmed the peasants. Then they piled up the guns and burned them and came back the next day and piled up anyone who owned more than one ox and burned them. 

I'm not mad at the people who believe the lies, though. They think they understand and are appalled, accepting the lies that the politicians and media spoon-feed them. Who can blame them for  trusting that they are being told the truth? The sad thing is that the political party that has long claimed to be the party of the people, the party of the working man, has made common cause with wealthy individuals and corporations and conspired to dump the rest of us into a heap they call the collective. And they want to make sure we won't be troublesome or able to resist when our betters decide they need to visit a "reeducation" facility because they disagree with the new order and won't shut up about it.

Someone I respect described these collectives or "unions" as bound up in bundles to be burned at the end of time. Statistics like the phony gun death statistics are the matches and make no mistake. They will not hesitate to light the pyres.

And the number one cause of death for children 0 through 17 is motor vehicle accidents by a good bit. Oddly, enough no one has called for private citizens not being licensed to drive cars an activity demonstrably more dangerous to actual children 

As I'm wont to say, "I believe Jesus is loading up the bus to come get us from this crazy place and take us home."

© 2023 by Tom King

Be Careful Little Hands What You Sign

I got an e-mail from Change.org this morning asking me to sign an "important" petition to protect our children. "What could it be?" I asked myself. Is the government threatening to force my children to be indoctrinated in schools with socialist, atheist or communist propaganda?

No. It's even worse!

Are they threatening to burden my children with a national debt they will never be able to pay off in a dozen lifetimes?

No, not that. The petitioner didn't want you to think about that.

Here is the burning issue our nation faces - the threat to the well-being of children (and I quote):

• Target is contributing to gender stereotypes and gender segregation by having pink and blue pegboards to identify particular toys (and aisles) as "girl toys" and "boy toys". It has been proven that not only is this bad for our childrens' self-esteem and intellectual prowess, but also contributes to bullying and ostracism.

Okay, let me valve off a little steam slowly so that my head does not explode. The opening paragraph of this petition starts off with a totally unsupportable statement linking genderized colors not only with the destruction of children's self-esteem, but also apparently with brain damage and social violence.

Perhaps the petition should also call for the removal of blue and pink from the crayon box. Maybe we also need to remove such colors from the sky in order to protect the environment from segregating us all by gender every time we look up.

What a flying crock of hoo-doo!  When you look at unbiased studies of the role of toys in gender identification, you find a different story. The entire diatribe that goes along with this bogus petition accuses retailer Target of promoting sexism because it uses color cues to show boys and girls which have the toys that intensive marketing research shows that boys and girls want. These studies are very scientific as the bottom line of a huge corporate retailer is at stake here and Christmas is only 8 months away. Got to be ready for those kids looking for toys they like.

Target will cave, of course. They are, after all, Walmart for liberals, but just for fun let's look at a the result of a real study. Back when I was in grad school studying psychology I ran across a study on toys and gender. I can't find it anymore. It was likely suppressed as politically incorrect.

Anyway, in this study, the researchers decided to provide children with toys not specific to their gender. They wanted to see if it was the kinds of toys kids played with that influenced the gender stereo-types they embraced as they grew up. They gave boys Barbie dolls and Easy Bake ovens. They gave the girls building blocks, Army men, trucks and cars. What they discovered as a result of months of intensive research was that if you bend Barbie at the waist and grab her by the legs, she makes a usable six-gun and that the Easy-Bake Oven will partially melt down smuggled in Army men so you can make your own dead guys. And you can build play houses out of Legos and park your dump trucks in front of it so your Army Men can come to a tea party.

We are biologically imprinted from birth to take on certain roles for which our sex qualifies us - at least those of us who don't have some kind of genetic misfire. Removing sexual identity cues from our children's worlds and even removing normal sexual cues and replacing them with non-gender or opposite gender cues serves only to confuse children.

We need our blue shirts and pink skirts. It's how we learn who we are and what we are in this troubled and confusing world. Trying to force some sort of artificial gender neutrality on human beings doesn't work unless, of course, you adopt the "Nebuchadnezzar method" and that only works with men. And remember why old Neb used to do that particular out-patient surgery. It was to remove any ambition from his male harem guards, slaves and clerks.

Are we really going to add one more artificial, politically correct prohibition to our culture that confuses young children? I'm not signing this petition. I'd rather barbecue a steak in an Easy-Bake Oven.

© 2014 by Tom King